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Anyone grown it on an allotment?
Is it possible to retrieve sugar from it?
Is it possible to retrieve sugar from it?
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No and Yes.............................https://www.sugar.org/blog/refining-...g-sugar-beets/ -
It doesn't seem worth it, except for novelty value.
You'd need to grow quite a lot to get a decent amount of sugar, the extraction process would be difficult, and sugar is dirt-cheap to buy, anyway.Comment
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Can you grow low sugar ones...……………………………...Comment
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I've no idea how "sweet" sugar beet tastes as a vegetable but can it be cooked and used in the way that carrots were used to replace sugar in wartime recipes?Comment
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"Ten pounds of sugar beets yields about 1 cup of sugar."
Yikes!
Oh well, that may remain a pipe dream...Comment
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I think you will find sugar beet is heavily subsidised, it's so inefficient compared to cane.
You could use it in your ersatz acorn coffee!Riddlesdown (S Croydon)Comment
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Using some numbers pulled from Farmers Weekly articles and general web searches:
yield of processed sugar is 15.5% (in 2017, 1.38 Mt sugar from 8.9 Mt beets);
record UK yield in 2017 was 121 tonnes per hectare, at 100,000 plants per hectare, which implies average 1.2 kg beets and roughly 1 plant per square foot (how much of that is space 'wasted' to allow machinery access?); best yield of sugar per beet, however, is obtained from plants sown at 15 cm spacing, i.e. 4 per square foot (could you actually fit 4.8 kg of beet in a square foot??).
So, best case scenario, on a small scale SFG allotment bed, with tenderly coddled plants, you might get 4 x 121 t/ha x 15.5% = 7.5 kg of sugar per square metre, which you could buy at the supermarket for less than £5, and you've not factored in the not insignificant energy cost of processing your beet pulp.
I'm disappointed.Comment
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